Mother Earth’s pilsner wins bronze at largest U.S. beer festival

Wednesday

Oct 16, 2013 at 12:01 AMOct 16, 2013 at 9:35 PM

Mother Earth Brewing’s take on the beverage came close to besting all in the country in reaching the pilsner standard, taking the bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver on Saturday.

Wes Wolfe / Staff Writer

Bohemian residents angry at the poor quality of their beer literally dumped it and created the pilsner.

Mother Earth Brewing’s take on the beverage came close to besting all in the country in reaching that standard, taking the bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver on Saturday.

The festival — deemed the largest in the United States — attracted 732 breweries from 49 states and the District of Columbia, with more than 70,000 beers on hand.

“We also won last year, with Dark Cloud, so we thought we might get something for Dark Cloud, but we ended up doing it for the Bohemian pilsner,” Mooring said.

In addition to the pilsner, named Porch Swing, Mother Earth also entered Dark Cloud, Endless River, Tripel Overhead, Weeping Willow and Windowpane. GABF included 84 categories of beer in the competition, though judges wouldn’t announce a medal winner in a given category if they didn’t have one that would match up to the set standard.

Pilsners can be harder to craft than some darker beers, in general.

“Generally, the lighter the style, the harder it is to brew,” Brewer said. “So, if you’re brewing an imperial stout with coffee in it, and barrel-aging it, there’s a lot of things to hide behind, compared to brewing a light lager. And, lagers are generally harder to brew, on top of it. They take longer to ferment and to age.

“But, the less ingredients to have, the less you have to hide behind, basically.”

Brewer continued on to say he was pleased to win with a German rather than American beer, because German beers have a longer history.

In terms of Central European brewing, though, the pilsner is a relatively modern concoction.

After about 600 years of brewing dark, top-fermenting beers of variable consistency, in 1838 the residents of Pilsen – then a western city in the Austrian Empire, now part of the Czech Republic – had enough and demanded a better-quality beer. The city council ordered more than 300 casks of the inferior brew destroyed.

As a replacement, residents and city officials established what was, in effect, a municipal brewery and recruited a Bavarian brewmaster to put out its first product. The bottom-fermenting, light, hoppy lager’s direct legacy is seen in the beer Pilsner Urquell, with the German word urquell meaning “fountainhead” or “original source.”

Of the hundreds of breweries in the beer festival, western states dominated and breweries from those states won the most medals. Mooring disputed the notion those breweries had a home-field advantage.

“I don’t think it’s a regional thing at all,” Mooring said. “I think it concerns who has the best beer.”

Barbara Fusco, sales and marketing director for the Brewers Association, the craft brewery trade group behind the GABF, said the volume of regional entries can be dictated by the simple number of breweries established.

She noted a couple East Coast states performed well, as a percentage.

“Breweries from Colorado and California won a lot of medals – and they also had a very high number of entries,” Fusco said. “One indicator of quality rather than quantity is the number of medals per entry from each state. Two East Coast states took high marks here, with New Jersey and Delaware winning out at 14.3 percent and 13 percent (ratio of medal to entries) respectively.”

Of the other North Carolina winners, Carolina Brewery of Chapel Hill and Pittsboro won bronze for its robust porter, Ole Hickory Brewery in Hickory won silver for the old ale or strong ale category, and Wicked Weed Brewing in Asheville won gold for its American-style Brett beer.

In the past, Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery in Farmville won bronze for its milk stout in 2006, and in 2009 won gold for its Baltic porter and bronze for its barrel-aged Baltic porter.

Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 and Wes.Wolfe@Kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter at @WolfeReports.

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